Wear of connector contacts is of great concern to the IT industry, due to the exposure of underlying layers of the connector contacts to environments that may cause corrosion. The exposure of the underlying layers is typically due to mechanical wear from excess plugging of connectors or can be associated with shock and vibe processes such as shipping.
Currently, when wear of a connector contact is examined, shock and vibe processes and plugging are first used to cause some wear of the connector contact. The connector contact typically comprises gold over nickel over copper. Once the test of shock and vibe or plugging is done, an evaluation of the wear of the connector contact must be done via an optical inspection. Then, the wear evaluation must be done via a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) examination. The above-mentioned method is the current process used for determining the exposure of the underlying metal networks in a connector contact. This method requires expensive equipment (more than US $250,000 currently) and is time consuming for examining many connector contacts.